Gulf Keystone’s chairman says the oil explorer will not prosper without its founder

LAST WEEKEND Simon Murray, the 74-year-old chairman of Gulf Keystone, boarded
a private jet bound for Erbil, capital of Kurdistan in northern Iraq.

Fifty miles away, the city of Mosul had been overrun to the jihadist forces of
the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (Isis), plunging the country into
chaos.

Murray, once a French foreign legionnaire in Algeria, is no stranger to the
battlefield. But in Iraq he was on business.

He had sought an audience with Ashti Hawrami, oil minister of Kurdistan, where
Gulf Keystone made a huge discovery that, for a time, made it one of the
most valuable companies on London’s junior AIM stock market.

That meeting may come to be seen as the turning point for a company that has
become a lightning rod for controversy.

Depending on whom you talk to, Gulf Keystone is either one of the most
exciting companies on the London